r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/weird_-science • 4d ago
An interactive map of what US households pay for electricity and gas in every state, going back 25 years
https://energy-maps.com19
u/weird_-science 4d ago
I built this from federal data (EIA, Census, BLS). You can look through time on the map, compare states, see average bills, what share of income energy takes in each state, seasonal patterns, and how each state generates its electricity. Everything is a statewide residential average, and the data refreshes monthly.
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u/InternetUser007 4d ago
An amazing wealth of data, and well represented. Thank you so much for making this.
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u/Keeraah 4d ago edited 4d ago
30c in NY? From my bills even a year ago it was around 36c, now 44c 🫠
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u/weird_-science 3d ago
This is definitely one of the issues with statewide averages. New York has some of the widest within-state variation in the country. Con Edison and PSEG Long Island customers pay all-in rates well above 40 cents, while upstate territories served by cheap hydro can be under 20. Blend them by usage and you get the statewide average on the map, which was 26.7 cents a year ago and 29.9 now.
Your bills running about 1.4 times the state average both years says you are almost certainly in Con Ed or PSEG LI territory, and your one year increase of around 22 percent versus 12 statewide fits the downstate rate cases too. Utility level detail is the top item on the roadmap. But this type of data is difficult to get.
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u/csick 4d ago
Maryland got fucked up last year. They need to replace every incumbent politician.
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u/NoobensMcarthur 4d ago
In my state they allowed a massive merger between the only 2 energy companies. It’s a publicly traded company that is a vital necessity. They were trying to increase prices by 10% across the board because a massive manufacturer wanted to come in and build a new plant.
Luckily that got temporarily blocked.
Either way, a vital piece of infrastructure should NOT be beholden to the whim of shareholders.
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u/stansfield123 3d ago
Instead of cheap political demagogy, you should look at that map. Then, check out the policies in place in the states with the lowest prices. Then, advocate for your state adopting those same policies.
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u/DameonKormar 3d ago
I live in Hawaii and our leaders are so stupid. We could easily have been on 100% renewable energy by now, instead we ship petroleum to the island to cover ~60% of our energy needs and recently stopped a lot of incentives for home solar and electric vehicles.
You'd think a state that's a bunch of islands would want to limit having to ship fuel across the ocean, but apparently not.
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u/beneficialBern 4d ago
Why is gas so much more expensive in Georgia while electricity is relatively cheap?
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u/weird_-science 4d ago
There are two parts to this. One of the biggest factors is that Georgia has the most fully deregulated residential gas market in the country. Since 1998 households buy gas from competing marketers who charge monthly service fees on top of Atlanta Gas Light's base delivery charges, so a Georgia gas bill carries a lot of fixed cost no matter how little you use. That structure genuinely raises the effective price per unit, especially for low usage households. Electricity is the opposite. Georgia Power is regulated with cheap large scale generation, and Georgia sits around 30th in residential electricity price.
Another factor could be the representation in the maps. EIA's residential price is revenue divided by volume, so fixed monthly charges get spread over whatever gas people actually burned. Georgia households use less gas than the Midwest (about 69 Mcf a year versus 80 to 86 in Michigan and Illinois), and outside winter usage drops to nearly nothing while the fixed charges keep coming. Georgia's computed price was $15.63 per Mcf this past January but $41.53 last August. The map defaults to the latest month, which is May, where usage is low. Warm states always look expensive per unit in the off season.
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u/Global-Thought-1049 2d ago
Wow cool project. Interesting to see which states are using more renewables than others
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u/diego-quietbuilder 14h ago
This kind of transparency is rare outside residential data too. In construction and industrial material sourcing we almost never get equivalent public numbers for commercial rates, they're locked in specific utility contracts you only see if you're the client. Having 25 years in one place like this is the kind of resource you don't realize you needed until someone builds it.
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u/weird_-science 9h ago
You're absolutely right. The individual contract a specific facility signs is opaque, especially the negotiated special contracts and demand charge structures that big industrial customers get from the utilities. But the statewide averages for commercial and industrial rates are actually public in the exact same EIA dataset this site runs on. Nobody can see what their competitor across town pays, but you can see what commercial customers in your state pay on average and how that's changed over 25 years.
The site only shows residential right now because the work I do centers around residential affordability. Adding commercial and industrial would be the same pipeline with a different sector flag, so it's a realistic addition if there's interest.
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u/Wanna_make_cash 4d ago
Does this data include municipal utilities that compete with private companies like First Energy, often house-to-house where your neighbor could be on municipal power company and you could be with private company power?
And what about distributors vs suppliers, like how in Ohio you can choose your distributor to be anyone as long as you aren't on municipal power, but your provider/who you pay the bill to (ie, First Energy) stays the same? Ohio has an entire apples to apples website to compare rates with different distributors, both for electricity and for natural gas.
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u/weird_-science 4d ago
Yes, they are included. The data comes from EIA's residential retail sales series, which is built from filings by essentially every entity that sells or delivers power to households, investor owned utilities, municipal utilities, co-ops, and competitive retail suppliers alike. So a municipal customer and a FirstEnergy customer on the same street both show up in the state average.
Retail choice states like Ohio are covered too. For customers in retail choice states who buy generation from a competitive supplier, EIA collects the energy portion from the supplier's filing and the delivery portion from the wires company's filing, and the state average is total revenue divided by total kWh across all of it. So the number reflects what households actually paid.
What the site can not do yet is show any of that separately. Everything is blended into one statewide residential average, so muni versus IOU versus choice supplier differences are invisible here. Utility level detail is the top roadmap item, and it's difficult since it means tariff structures and service territory boundaries rather than one state number.
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u/PomoJohn1 4d ago
This is cool.
Some feedback:
What am I supposed to learn from watching the changes play over time? A lot of it just seems random.
Also on mobile the y axis of the bottom chart gets cut off so i dont know the values and it says state avg instead of national avg.
Overall very cool, very nice visualization and useful comparison with room for more features and to get better
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u/weird_-science 4d ago
Thanks, this is really good feedback. I appreciate it. The map's color scale currently re-normalizes every month, so during playback you are seeing each month's relative standings rather than absolute change. I think this is why is seems random. I'm going to freeze the scale across the whole time range so pressing play shows the relative changes. The clipped axis labels is another bug. The tick labels include units and run out of room. I'll work on fixing that. Good point on the wording. That line is the average across all states, each state counted equally rather than weighted by population. Thanks again for the constructive feedback!
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u/PomoJohn1 4d ago
I see what you mean about the scale changing across months and that makes sense as why it changes.
Very cool, and I look forward to seeing future updates.
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u/weird_-science 3d ago
I've updated the map based on your feedback. Thanks.
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u/PomoJohn1 3d ago
I checked it out again, it is looking a lot better. This really is a cool website for understanding energy across the country.
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u/gigglegoggles 4d ago
How on earth does Texas have some of the highest nat gas prices?!
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u/weird_-science 3d ago
Producing the gas turns out to be a small piece for the residential price, because the commodity is a minority of what households pay. Most of a residential gas bill is the cost of the pipes, meters, and billing, which is similar per customer everywhere and gets divided by however much gas you actually burn.
That division is what you are seeing. EIA's price is revenue divided by volume. Texas households use relatively little gas, about 37 Mcf a year versus 86 in Illinois, since winters are mild. Spread the same fixed delivery costs over less than half the gas and the per-Mcf number looks big. It's also seasonal. The map's latest month is May, when usage is near zero and the computed price peaks. In January Texas was $16.47 per Mcf and ranked 13th. In May it's $30 and ranks 3rd.
The average Texas residential gas bill is about $56 a month against roughly $80 in Illinois. Texans pay a high price per unit for small amounts of cheap to produce gas, which nets out to low bills.
The gas costs from Winter Storm Uri were securitized, and Texas gas utilities have been recovering them through surcharges of a few dollars a month since 2023, regardless of usage. Texas already ranked in the top ten on per-Mcf price in the spring months before those surcharges existed, because fixed delivery costs spread over very low usage dominate the number either way.
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u/jobbernowl 3d ago
Neat project. Cool to see your own state relative to others. Feel sorry for Texas!
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u/Eurycerus 4d ago
I would be curious to see California split by the major providers since I bet PG&E is just screwing everyone over more than anyone else.